Friday 30 October 2009 13.15 EDT
First published on Friday 30 October 2009 13.15 EDT

They may have slipped up on the business front by sparking the worst Wall Street crisis since the Great Depression. But top executives at the defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers had a skilled eye for art, amassing an impressive collection of contemporary works by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg.

In an opportunity for enthusiasts to pick up a sliver of Wall Street history, more than 280 artworks owned by Lehman will go under the hammer at an auction house in Philadelphia this weekend in the latest effort by liquidators to recoup a few dollars for creditors left short-changed by the collapse of the 158-year-old financial institution.

Most of the works in the auction are priced at between $5,000 (£3035) and $20,000 each. Many hung on the 31st floor executive offices of the bank's Manhattan headquarters, or on the 32nd floor where clients were entertained in a suite of silver service dining rooms. The sale is the first of three auctions of 400 Lehman artworks expected to raise about $1.1m.

Anne Henry, vice-president of modern art at auctioneer Freeman's, which is conducting the sale, said the earliest works in the collection were bought by Lehman in the 1970s and the most recent, including a painting by Chester Arnold called Meaning of Communication, were bought as late as 2008 - within months of bankruptcy. Barclays, which bought the remnants of Lehman, passed on a right of first refusal to the collection.

"Their sensibilities and tastes evolved over the years," said Henry. Earlier acquisitions tended to centre on quintessential views of Manhattan, while later purchases included prints by recognisable twentieth century artists including the American pop artists Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps the most prominent print on the block is a blue, yellow and red image of the Statue of Liberty, part of a 1982 series by Roy Lichtenstein entitled I Love Liberty.

Art buffs

Most top banks have art collections, both for investment purposes and as a treasure trove of status symbols to impress affluent clients. UBS, for example, owns 40,000 works of art while JP Morgan Chase can boast a 30,000-strong collection. Government bail-outs of certain banks have prompted pressure to make more works available to the public - this month, Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 70% owned by British taxpayers, announced it would put many of its 2,200 artworks on public display.

At Lehman, the bank's former chief executive Dick Fuld and his wife, Kathy, were known to be art buffs. The couple have a gallery named after them at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. And in the wake of the Lehman bankruptcy in September last year, the Fulds sold off a personal collection of abstract impressionist drawings, including three by Willem de Kooning, for $13.5m

Lawrence McDonald, a former Lehman vice-president whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense chronicled the bank's collapse, said Lehman's art was off limits to the vast majority of the bank's workforce.

"There was no art on the trading floors - and out of 25,000 people, very few ever saw the 31st floor," said McDonald, who believes senior executives' penchant for art was a result of "becoming consumed with legacy, with power and with projection of power".

The liquidation of Lehman, which had $613bn of debts, is expected to take as long as three years. The bank has a further collection of art, worth millions more, on which surviving asset management arm Neuberger Berman has an option. Insolvency experts recently completed the sale of Lehman's fleet of corporate aircraft including two Gulfstream jets, a Dassault Falcon 50 and a Sikorsky helicopter.